The way we talk about data and technology as being an open frontier is still justifying abstraction of Native humanity and Native land the same way it did when it was an actual idea of a land frontier. And in most instances, there is no such thing. It is always a myth.
The frontier was never a description of empty land. The frontier was a legal finding. In 1823, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice Marshall imported the doctrine of discovery into American property law and held that Native nations held only a right of occupancy, while ultimate title vested in the discovering sovereign. That is a court deciding, on paper, that people standing on land are not in the way of ownership because they were never owners. Terra nullius is not a geographic observation. Terra nullius is a filing status.
So when somebody tells you today that a piece of land is available, ask them what document made it available. Watch how the same trick runs in 2026, in four different agencies, in four different states, in the same calendar year.
Exhibit one. In the Black Hills, at Pe’ Sla, a high meadow that Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people describe as the heart of everything that is, a company moved to drill for graphite. Graphite is a critical mineral. Critical minerals go into the batteries and the chips and the cooling infrastructure that make the AI buildout physically possible. In 2016 the United States put more than two thousand acres of that area into trust for four tribes. In 2024 the federal government agreed to protect a two mile radius around a portion of it. And in February 2026 the Forest Service allowed exploration anyway, using a categorical exclusion, which is the administrative device that says a project is too small to require environmental review or public comment.
A categorical exclusion is terra nullius with a form number.
In late April 2026 the drilling started, and Oglala Lakota youth locked their bodies to the equipment, and the Oglala Lakota Nation Youth Council said, this is not a protest, it is the protection of our spiritual center. In May a federal district court in South Dakota ordered the company to stop, because the Forest Service had unlawfully excluded the project from environmental review and from tribal input. They won. And the reason they had to win in court instead of never being in that position is that almost all hardrock mining on public land in this country is still governed by the General Mining Act of 1872. Eighteen seventy two. Ulysses S. Grant was president. Under that statute a person can stake a claim on public land for a small fee and begin work.
Exhibit two. In Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, near McAlester, an Australian company called IREN has been advancing Project Emerald, a proposed 1.2 gigawatt campus on roughly two thousand acres along Highway 69 south of Kiowa, with a figure of fifty billion dollars attached to it. In April 2026 a county review committee formally recommended tax increment finance districts tied to it. Taylor’s point about that area is the one that matters most: the land in question sits where municipal protections do not reach, so it defaults to state regulation, and the state regulation is thin to nonexistent. Her organization found that the rural water district the project would draw from was not even notified in advance.
Exhibit three. Statewide, data centers in Oklahoma do not need a water permit. The director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board said it directly, that if a data center wants to purchase water, it can do that, and it does not get a permit. There is no official count of how many are operating in the state. A development advisory firm lists fifty five facilities. None of them have applied for a water permit, because they buy from municipal or rural systems as a customer, which means the state’s own tracking of its own water has a hole in it exactly the size of the industry that is arriving. This is in a state coming off years of drought, where wheat farmers just took the worst harvest in decades.
Exhibit four. The five year ad valorem exemption for manufacturers, which Oklahoma voters approved in 1985, before the commercial internet existed, now covers data centers. A definition written for factories in the Reagan administration became the door.
Four agencies. Four states of the paperwork. Same finding every time: this land is available, because our file says so.
Apply Voyles here.
Traci Brynne Voyles studied uranium mining in Navajo country and gave us the word wastelanding. Her argument is not simply that certain places get polluted more than others. Her argument is that a place has to be rendered as waste in the mind and in the record before it can be treated as waste in practice. The wasteland is produced. It is produced through law, through survey, through economic description, through the quiet consensus that nothing of value is there and nobody of value lives there. Pollution follows the category. The category comes first.
Which means the fight over a data center is never actually a fight about a building. It is a fight about a description. And the description is written years before the concrete gets poured.
They Over Police You Into a Discount
They justify taking over a community for a data center by devaluing the community, and they might do that based off of showing you arrest data. And you know how we going to do it? We going to over police the community to justify over criminalizing the community. And then we can say, hey, listen, developers, this piece of shit land right here ain’t worth much, it’s a bunch of degenerates, take that shit.
That is wastelanding described by somebody who watched it happen to his own people, without the citation, before the citation. That is the whole apparatus in five sentences. Arrest data is not a measurement of a community. Arrest data is a product of a deployment decision. Where you send officers determines where you find offenses, and the record of offenses then becomes the appraisal, and the appraisal becomes the sale.
So look at what the record says about Oklahoma. Black people make up roughly eight percent of Oklahoma’s population and Black women make up roughly twenty percent of the state’s incarcerated women. Native people make up roughly nine percent of the state population and Native women make up roughly thirteen percent of the women’s prison population, imprisoned at about three times the rate of white women, the highest imprisonment rate of any group of women in the state. Roughly two thirds of the women in Oklahoma prisons are mothers.
When I was living in Oklahoma I was part of campaigns to bond women out for Mother’s Day and to get incarcerated mothers presents for their kids at Christmas. The women were Black and Native, and some poor white women too, shout out to y’all, you was in there. But the overrepresentation was Black and Native, in a state where we ain’t even the population.
That is the ledger the developer reads. And nobody has to write a memo saying so. The devaluation is already sitting in a public database.
Then comes the surveillance layer, which Taylor connected to the same fight, and this is where a lot of folks lose the thread. There is a campaign in Oklahoma City to deflock the city. Flock is a company that deploys automated license plate reader cameras as a policing tool, which in practice is continuous surveillance of an entire population’s movement. Norman rejected a Flock contract after residents pushed back on privacy grounds. Moore has it. Oklahoma City has it.
Look at the demographic map of those three places and then ask the obvious question. Norman skews whiter. The places that kept the cameras get darker. Why do they get to have more surveillance? Y’all catch that.
Simone Browne is the scholar for this. Browne traces surveillance in the United States back through slave passes, lantern laws, and the branded body, and argues that Blackness has functioned as a kind of prototype, that the technologies get developed and refined on the people society has already decided are legitimate to watch, and then those technologies get generalized outward to everybody. Apply Browne here and the data center stops being adjacent to the surveillance question and becomes its infrastructure. They are building surveillance and perfecting surveillance based off of surveilling particular communities, communities that are already policed, already disenfranchised, already getting messed over politically and socially and economically.
And here is where Taylor’s friend Ash gets quoted, and it is the cleanest formulation in the whole transcript. When something is free, you are the product.
Two things can be true. The data center takes your water and your power and your land, and the data center sells your movement back to you as a public safety service. It is extractive in multiple ways. It is not just pollution, it is extraction, and then it is sold back to you in the form of data.
Taylor’s organization has a name for the full circuit. They call it the death cycle of AI.
Settler Colonial Legal Trickery
In July 2020 the Supreme Court decided McGirt v. Oklahoma. Justice Gorsuch, writing for a five to four majority, held that Congress never properly disestablished the Muscogee reservation, and the reasoning extended to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole reservations as well. Roughly half the land area of the state of Oklahoma was confirmed to still be Indian country. The state predicted the apocalypse. The governor claimed tens of thousands of cases would go unprosecuted.
Two years later, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a five to four majority written by Justice Kavanaugh held that states retain concurrent criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by non Indians against Indians in Indian country. McGirt was not overturned. McGirt was narrowed. Gorsuch dissented in terms that are worth reading in full sometime.
Here is what I need you to see about that pair of cases. McGirt confirmed the boundary. Castro-Huerta reopened the state’s hand inside the boundary. And neither case gave anybody back an acre.
In early August 2026, the Cherokee Nation, the largest tribal nation by enrollment in the United States, announced a ban on hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust land, following a months long task force study that found sixty four percent of surveyed citizens opposed. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the Nation’s primary responsibility is protecting citizens from these threats, and added that the Nation will not support hyperscale projects anywhere on the reservation without proper consultation.
That is a real win. Take the win.
Now here’s the settler colonial trickery. The Cherokee Nation reservation covers about seven thousand square miles, roughly 4.4 million acres. The Nation’s own real estate office reports oversight of about 46,000 acres of restricted land, more than 62,000 acres of trust land, and more than 5,100 acres of tribal fee land. Add it up. The ban has full legal force over something in the neighborhood of one hundred thirteen thousand acres out of four point four million.
That is under THREE percent.
The Nation said it plainly in its own report: it has limited influence over development on non tribal land inside the reservation, and full authority on trust and tribally owned land. And there are already at least two data centers under development inside that reservation.
Why? Allotment. That is why. The Dawes machinery cut the land base into a checkerboard more than a century ago, and every parcel that passed out of Native hands stayed out. So when McGirt confirmed that the reservation was never disestablished, what got confirmed was jurisdiction over a boundary, not ownership inside it. The sovereignty is real. The footprint is Swiss cheese, and the holes were cut in 1887.
5 KEY TAKEAWAYS
The frontier is a filing status, not a place. From Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823 to a Forest Service categorical exclusion in February 2026, land does not become available by being empty, it becomes available when a document declares that whoever is standing on it does not count as an owner. Ask who wrote the document.
A moratorium is a ceasefire and a ban is a decision. Oklahoma City passed an emergency moratorium on April 21, 2026 and gutted it with exemptions on May 19 by a seven to two vote after industry supporters packed the chambers. The Seminole Nation voted 24 to 0 for an indefinite ban and has not moved. Pauses get lifted. Decisions have to be reversed in public.
Devaluation comes before dispossession, and policing is how it gets documented. Over policing produces arrest data, arrest data becomes the community’s reputation, and the reputation becomes the appraisal a developer quotes. Oklahoma incarcerates Native women at roughly three times the rate of white women, and Black women make up about twenty percent of the state’s incarcerated women from about eight percent of the population.
McGirt confirmed a boundary, not a land base. The Cherokee Nation’s August 2026 hyperscale ban has full force over roughly 113,000 acres of a 4.4 million acre reservation, because allotment cut the land into a checkerboard in 1887 and every parcel that left Native hands stayed gone. Sovereignty without title is jurisdiction over other people’s property.
Oklahoma’s school funding is on the ballot August 25 and it is a data center question. State Question 844 would end the constitutional requirement that the state reimburse schools and counties for the five year manufacturing property tax exemption that data centers now claim. The state paid about $88.6 million in reimbursements last fiscal year, Pryor Public Schools alone received $24 million, and Mayes County received about $35.6 million in 2026.
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RELATED READINGS (BIBLIOGRAPHY)
Settler colonialism, land, and extraction
Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2006.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline. Verso, 2019.
Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes, 2017.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization, 2012.
LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press, 1999.
Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. University of California Press, 2005.
Chang, David A. The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832 to 1929. UNC Press, 2010.
Krauthamer, Barbara. Black Slaves, Indian Masters. UNC Press, 2013.
Roberts, Alaina E. I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Grinde, Donald, and Quintard Taylor, on Black and Native relations in Indian Territory.
